Your program may be showing the background, not the ROX backdrop, but the system
background, which is indeed black. Same thing happens in conky if you use the
"transparent", "own window" and "normal" settings. It is little known, but you can have
a "hierarchy" of backgrounds, which are used at different levels of the Linux system.

the "-tr -tint white -sh 67" settings will allow the ROX background to seep through, with
a shade of white. Not so with conky, because conky, when its "own window" is set to
"normal", is looking at the system background, not at the ROX background.

In your case, I believe that you may need to introduce your same background earlier,
in the .initrc code, through a program such as qiv. See attached illustration. For your
transparency to work, my hunch is that the picture called by qiv (line 107) should be the
same as the one used by ROX. Also, please note that the addition needs to go just
below the xsetroot call.

Again, I don't know anything about Genie, but I hope this helps. Keep us posted?

1. I modified the third line in the code above (set_source_rgba) so that the last parameter, the alpha value, was 1. This successfully painted the background a nice blue colour - this shows my code seems to be setting the background to something and that the alpha channel makes a difference.

2. I then set the alpha value on the same line to 0.5. The background became a darker blue - as if the black and blue were being merged. Exactly what you would expect if composition is taking place and the alpha channel was working but the background was black.

3. Next I switched off composition and switched off the Rox filer pinboard. This showed me a black background - exactly what Musher predicted

4. I then switched on xcompmgr and the background turned grey - this is really strange as this means that having composition switched on is affecting the black background beneath the Rox pinboard.

5. I then switched off xcompmgr and modified my .xinitrc file as suggested. Rebooting X gave me the same background as the Rox filer background (except without the icons). Again as expected.

6. I then switched on composition and the background turned grey (not a composited version of the background image but the same grey as in step 4). That I was not expecting.

7. Then I tried running my code - and it continued to give the same black background whether or not the pinboard was showing.

All of the above is very strange. Why does the image set with qiv disappear when composition is turned on? What is the black background being composited with to create the grey? And, why is my code still getting a black background even when I paint the background with an image?

One other oddity is that when I run xcompmgr and I have switched off the pinboard, if I move a window around I cannot see the outline of the window unless I move it over another window. The grey background seems to hide the outline.

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